Everything has Changed
(Click or tap to enlarge)
The June demo represents the most significant overhaul yet.
As a matter of fact,
so much changed just during this week that I now feel like the recent
teaser trailer is already out-of-date.
The game feels and plays very differently now.
It still needs a lot of balancing,
and the upgrades themselves need both expansion and diversification,
but the overall shape of things is becoming much better defined.
Here’s a list of what’s new:
Gameplay
- Completely reworked stats and upgrades system
- Removed “levels” from upgrades - you either have them or you don’t
- Upgrades are sorted into trees with unlockable tiers
- The size of the projectiles from your cannon is controlled by a stat (which can be increased by upgrades)
- Modified base stats of all drones
- Stats (not just upgrades) are now displayed in the HUD
- Removed “energy” system, and replaced it with a regenerative shield (which can be burned for an extra speed boost)
- Removed unlockable maneuvering upgrades - all drones now have all movement capabilities
- Added “cruise” mode key (Z) to allow playstyles involving automatic constant forward movement
Crystals and Saucers
- Saucers only fire when you are facing them
- Saucer shots move faster, but they no longer home in on your position
- Saucers take up positions in front of you, instead of orbiting your position
- The larger cube sizes now spawn in fixed positions (spinning in place) to provide a better sense of your relative movement or stillness
- The smaller cube sizes spawn with a slightly faster rate of motion
Sounds and Music
- Player firing sound has been changed
- Soundtrack during gameplay consists of drums and string pad
- Adjusted reverb level and overall audio tone
- Rebalanced the volume levels of many sound effects
- Increased overall game sound volume level
- Reworked the chord voicings used by the pitched sound effects in the game
- Crystals make randomly pitched sounds (from the active chord voicing) when they explode
- Saucers make a musical sound (from the current chord voicing) when they are destroyed
Visuals and Cosmetics
- Switched all text away from the default/stock Godot font
- Rearranged the LED meters
- Replaced countdown number with a yellow countdown LED meter
- Enhanced the visibility/readability of all HUD text
- Modified several rendering components to work correctly at arbitrary frame rates
- Made cubes pulse in time with the music, at a speed determined by their size
- Physics is no longer paused between missions
Code Quality
- Switched to multi-mesh rendering for everything except spacecraft (to enhance performance)
- Expanded test coverage and functionality
- Added internal infrastructure to speed up navigation and searching of increasingly large codebase
- Massive clean-up of player drone rendering code, to facilitate easier improvements in future
- Improved structure and functionality of test keys and functions in debug builds
- Rewrote and simplified engine thrust computation code, to work better with current player control and stats systems
- Removed “ghost ships” yet again. Twice. (Seriously.)
The download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.
(Archived gamedev post from 2026-06-05)
Where to next?
